An important opportunity in graduate school is to get peer and mentor feedback on results. One of the best ways to do that is to share what you have been working on with your colleagues at a symposium.

Jordan Green, Johns Hopkins University associate professor of biomedical engineering and executive committee member for the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology, was named one of Popular Science magazine’s Brilliant Ten. The magazine recognized “inspired young scientists and engineers … whose ideas will transform the future.”

Jordan Green (Photo by Marty Katz)

Green’s work focuses on using nanoscale particles made in the shape of footballs that can train the body’s own immune system to tackle cancer cells. Turns out, particles with the elongated ovoid shape have a slightly larger surface area, which gives them an edge over spherical particles. The football-shaped particles did a better job of triggering the immune system to attack the cancer cells.

Green collaborated with Jonathan Schneck, M.D., Ph.D., professor of pathology, medicine and oncology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Both are affiliated faculty members of Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology. Their work was published in the journal Biomaterials on Oct 5, 2013.

Apparently in the quest to treat or cure cancer, football trumps basketball. Research from the laboratory of Jordan Green, Ph.D., assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, has shown that elliptical football-shaped microparticles do a better job than basketball-shaped ones in triggering an immune response that attacks cancer cells.

Green collaborated with Jonathan Schneck, M.D., Ph.D., professor of pathology, medicine and oncology. Both are affiliated faculty members of Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology. Their work was published in the journal Biomaterials on Oct 5.

The particles, which are essentially artificial antigen presenting cells (APCs), are dotted with tumor proteins (antigens) that signal trouble to the immune response. It turns out that flattening the spherical particles into more elliptical, football-like shapes provides more opportunities for the fabricated APCs to come into contact with cells, which helps initiate a stronger immune response.

If you think about it, this makes sense. You can’t tackle someone on the basketball court the way you can on the gridiron.

Editor’s Note: The following is a summary of one of the talks from the 2013 Nano-bio Symposium hosted by Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology held May 17. This summary was written by Randall Meyer, a doctoral candidate in the biomedical engineering and a member of the Cancer Nanotechnology Training Center. Look for other symposium summaries on the INBT blog.

One of the key features of nanotechnology is its wide range of applicability across multiple biological scenarios ranging from gene therapy to immune system modulation. Jordan Green, an assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, summarized some of the fascinating applications of nanotechnology on which his laboratory has been working. Green is an INBT affiliated faculty member.

One of the Green lab projects involves the design and implementation of nanoparticle based vectors for delivery of genetic material to the cell. Green demonstrated how these particles could be used to deliver DNA and induce expression of a desired gene, or small interfering RNA (siRNA) to silence the expression of a target gene. These genetic therapeutics are being developed to target a wide variety of retinal diseases and cancers.

Jordan Green (Photo by Marty Katz)

As opposed to viral based vectors for gene therapy, nonviral vectors such as nanoparticles are safer, more flexible in their range of cellular targets, and can carry larger cargoes than viruses, Green explained.

Another project in the Green lab involves the development of micro and nano dimensional artificial antigen presenting cells (aAPCs) for cancer immunotherapy. These aAPCs mimic the natural signals that killer T-cells receive when there is an invader (bacteria, virus, cancer cell, etc.) in the body. The Green lab is currently working with these particles to stimulate the immune system to fight melanoma.

Blue and black, or white and gold? That is the question, apparently. Yes, we are still talking about The Dress, if you can believe it (even though we are secretly convinced that the white/gold camp is just having a laugh at our expense—it's clearly blue and black). To (ahem) shed some light on this great […]